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Samsung's Developer Challenge is over, with the top app earning a prize of $300,000 as the company continues to big up its third mobile platform.

Not content with manufacturing the flagship Android handset and one of the best Windows Phone 7 devices, Samsung is still banging the Bada drum. In June, the company put almost $3m in prize money on the table for its Global Developer Challenge, which has now been awarded to the 24 winners split across eight categories.

The winning application, which scooped $300,000, was Little Sailor - a 3D sailing emulator that attempts to teach the basics of dinghy sailing without all that mucking about with boats. Other category winners (netting $100,000 each) include games, an OCR package and a photograph retouching app, all of which are free to download for the next month.

Other than Little Sailor we were taken by the superbly Stalinist TouchRetouch, which perfectionists and passive-aggressives alike can use to remove an ex-partner or unlovely child from a photograph.

BadaShelf is another highlight - it reads barcodes to catalogue your book collection, useful for those who've resorted to boxes in lieu of shelf space. Also worth a look for free is the snappily-named bControl12, which enables the Wave handset to be used as a PC remote control.

Samsung owns the whole Bada value chain, in the same way that Apple owns the iOS chain, but is hedging its bets by supporting Android and Windows Phone 7 too. Bada is supposed to bring smartphone functionality into mid-range handsets, where Symbian is also expected to play, but such aspirations are apparently undermined by the decreasing price of Android handsets.